A few hours ago, at the Google I/O 2010 conference,
Google announced they will be releasing the state-of-the-art video codec
VP8
under an open source and royalty-free basis.
In fact, the VP8 codec will be combined with the already free and
royalty-free
Vorbis
audio codec
and the Matroska
container format
to build a new standard for video
and audio on the web called WebM.
Google will add WebM support to the Chrome browser and to Youtube.
Immediately after the announcement, support for WebM was also announced by
Mozilla
for Firefox, and by
Opera.

This is big news. Some suspected that open sourcing VP8 was the ultimate
goal of Google when they acquired it from On2 Technologies last year.
But at the time, the
press
release did not give any explicit hint about the purpose of the acquisition.
I talked about early adoption in the past, but this is definitely a technology
that will become the video and audio standard of the web, so adopting it today
will certainly make you an early adopter. If Microsoft does not want to be left
behind, they have support WebM as well, and I believe they eventually will.